General William Westmoreland

William Childs Westmoreland, soldier, died on July 18th, aged 91

THOUGH many tried to dissuade him, in 1974 William Westmoreland (General, US army, retired) ran for the governorship of South Carolina. He lost, and was not surprised. “I'm used to a structured organisation”, he confessed afterwards, “and this civilian process is so doggone nebulous.”

That word, for him, summed up the frustrations of a general's life in a democracy. During his years in Vietnam, as commander of American forces from 1964 to 1968, he had been fighting not only a subtle, nimble enemy hidden in villages and jungle, but a miasma of criticism, hatred and political timidity at home. He was never his own master, but the servant of Lyndon Johnson and his civilian advisers. He could not even choose where to direct the bombing of North Vietnam, since, as he growled in his memoirs, “this or that target was not to be hit for this or that nebulous non-military reason.”

General Westmoreland himself was the reverse of nebulous: tall, well-eyebrowed, jut-chinned, and with an impressive scar on his left cheek from hurtling through a windscreen as a child. His creed was “Duty, Honour, Country”, as drilled into every cadet at West Point. His approach to strategy was bluntly old-fashioned, not to say heavy-handed. The South Vietnamese army had to be structured as a conventional force, ready for large-scale military operations, even though it was fighting guerrillas. America needed to hit North Vietnam “surely, swiftly, and powerfully...with sufficient force to hurt”, as at Khe Sanh, where B-52s dropped more than 100,000 tonnes of bombs over two months. And troops needed to be poured in. General Westmoreland's tactics were simple: take the war to the enemy, and kill him faster than he could be replaced. Where possible, apply overwhelming, stunning force. “A great country”, he liked to say, quoting the Duke of Wellington, “cannot wage a little war.”

On General Westmoreland's watch, the numbers of Americans in South Vietnam rose from 15,000 military “advisers” in 1964 to 500,000 troops by 1968, and he wanted more. The conflict, he believed, was winnable. A combination of flawed intelligence, book-cooking, random “body-counts” and wishful thinking led to chronic underestimates of the strength of the enemy. He could win the war, he told Johnson early in 1968, if he had 206,000 extra men and if the reserves were mobilised. At this suggestion, Johnson's advisers sharply drew in breath. If this was what was needed to reach “the light at the end of the tunnel”, America could not do it. Within the year, General Westmoreland had been replaced, the bombing of the North moderated, and the scene set for talks.

He was blamed for losing the war, America's only defeat in its history. In his view, however, this “noble” conflict was lost only in the public mind and in the pages of the New York Times. True, in April 1975 helicopters had winched the last Americans from the rooftops of Saigon as the city fell to the Vietcong; but this, in General Westmoreland's view, was a defeat for the South Vietnamese. American troops had not been bested in any engagement of significance. Instead, in 1973 the politicians had made them stop fighting, like a boxer who, with his opponent on the ropes, suddenly and inexplicably throws in the towel. They would certainly have won, the general insisted, if they had been allowed to expand operations into Laos, Cambodia and the North, disrupting chains of supply and recruitment to the Vietcong. But Johnson, fearing to stir up Russia or China, had never allowed it.

From horses to helicopters

The chaos and complexities of Vietnam were not what General Westmoreland had been trained for. On his graduation in 1936, as an artillery officer, the big guns he encountered were Model 1897 French 75s with steel-rimmed wooden wheels, drawn by horses. His great-uncle, who had fought for the Confederacy with many other ardent South Carolinians, would have recognised this style of warfare. General Westmoreland, however, came to shape modern ways of fighting, especially with his massive use of helicopter gunships to gain mobility in battle. These, flying in assault formation, became the motif of the Vietnam war.

In a less controversial conflict, General Westmoreland might have been given more credit. He took care of his men, to the point of parachuting first from aircraft in case the wind was dangerous. He believed in keeping up morale with copious medals and commendations (his commendation of Charlie Company, after its infamous torching and massacre of the village of My Lai, being an unfortunate mistake). But he was not forgiven for his rosy forecasts of how the war would go. He became army chief of staff, but was never promoted to the joint chiefs. As the war dragged on into the Nixon years, he was rarely sought for his advice.

Reporters sometimes asked what he thought of his “counterpart” on the North Vietnamese side, Vo Nguyen Giap. He bristled at that: not because he thought him a bad soldier or a bad man, but because Giap had been a powerful member of his government, and had been able to impose his wishes on the rest. Not so General Westmoreland, defeated by a cloud.